Friday, October 7, 2011

Finding Ada, but with better technology examples!

The three engineers are wonderful examples of excellence, ones I'd gladly mention. What bugs me is that he cited... ewww.... ATM. His third paragraph mentioned why I go, "ewww..." over ATM. He didn't have to deal with (I think) some of the politics of ATM zealots, but that doesn't take away from Allyn's, Sally's, or Renee's abilities or contributions.

In fact, it's not difficult to cite further contributions from each of them... two of which I can further support with source code!

First off, Sally Floyd is well known for much TCP and congestion control goodness. If you followed the link to Sally's page you can see all (or at least most) of her work for yourself. I unfortunately don't know of any quickly-linkable code to cite, but I'll gladly accept suggestions.

Allyn Romanow was a engineer at Sun, and worked in my old group (Solaris Internet Engineering) while she was there. Her big contribution to the Solaris TCP/IP stack was the support for large, fast networks (aka. RFC 1323), which you can see scattered throughout the TCP code, particularly here.

Renee Danson (now Sommerfeld), also an engineer at Sun, escaped the world of ATM to join Internet Engineering later on. I was fortunate to have her land with Team IPsec for a while. As we were bringing up IKE for Solaris 9, I was hoping to have a command-line tool alter the running IKE daemon using the Solaris lightweight IPC mechanism known as doors. Renee made this happen. Because of a large OEM component, the IKE daemon source isn't available for browsing, but the control program, ikeadm(1M) is there for the world to see.

An unofficial IETF slogan was, "We believe in rough consensus and running code." I figured it's even better to find Ada with some running code to back it up.